Judy’s Job Description

Atrios points to this very informative article about Judith Miller by Russ Baker. There’s a lot to it, but he mentions one thing in particular that has long puzzled me:

Fine. But they owe the rest of the country’s journalists — whose future ability to work with confidential sources and to operate with public credibility is affected by this — a far greater sense of what Miller’s role was in the affair, and of what “nuances” are involved. This can be done without naming the source. For example, Miller could explain what the source told her, and if it was one or more sources, and whether she called the source or the source called her, without revealing the source’s identity — which is the only issue involved in the confidentiality pledge.

This is what I don’t get. Why can’t Judith Miller write an article about what she knows without revealing her source? She is, allegedly, a reporter.

Matt Cooper wrote an article. Robert Novak wrote an article. Walter Pincus wrote an article. All three have dealt differently with the special prosecutor on the subject of confidential sources. But they ALL wrote articles about what they were told, which means that if they decided to protect their source, they were doing it in service of performing their jobs. And just because she didn’t write one at the time doesn’t mean she can’t write one now. She’s still employed by the NY Times.

Reporters write articles in order to inform the public. That is the essence of their job. In order to do that they sometimes have to keep their sources confidential. Miller has not done the one thing she must do to justify keeping her source confidential — inform the public of what she knows about the story. Neither is there even a bit of evidence that she was ever even working on a story about this subject.

Woodward and Bernstein kept Mark Felt’s confidence for decades — but at the time they were using his information to unravel a complicated story that they were writing about every day. Miller has not written one word on this subject. Even if we grant that she has an obligation to protect liars who use the news media for character assasination, we can’t say that she should be able to do this in service of anything but doing her job as a journalist — either as part of an investigation or a story. And if she has a story, she should be forced by her editors to write what she knows (protecting her source if necessary, just as Cooper did) or be fired for not doing her job.

How she deals with Fitzgerald is up to her. I think when a reporter is used by a powerful members of the government, in their official capacity, to destroy political opponents with lies, that a reporter should be automatically released from any confidentiality agreement. Otherwise, it is nothing but outsourced government propaganda. Others disagree. But that has no bearing on her responsibility as a journalist and employee of the most important newspaper in the world.

Miller may now be saving her information for the blockbuster book she’s planning to write, but that doesn’t explain why the NY Times didn’t insist that Miller do her job and write a story about what she knows, even if she can’t reveal who told her about it. It’s in the public interest, all the other journalists have done it, why can’t she?

.